Slam Bolt Scrappers PSN Post Mortem

The last Boston Post Mortem was presented by, Eitan Glinert of Firehose Games.

The talk was a post mortem into their PSN released game, Slam Bolt Scrappers, which pre-release had received very favourable news from Pax East etc, but since release has not been getting the same kind of reviews. They cover the highs, lows and the bittersweets of the development and cover the lack of online multiplayer which was one of the biggest detractors in the reviews for the game.

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This presentation was filmed by Firehose.

Legal Basics for Game Companies

A free half day conference in Waltham MA, hosted by Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton, P.C. on the 5th of May 2011.

The iternary of the event is as follows:

Game Law Basics Sessions:

• VC & Angel Financing - 1:00 - 2:00 pm
• Strategic Partnering - 2:00 - 3:00 pm
• IP Protection - 3:00 - 4:00 pm
• Formation - 3:00 - 4:00 pm
• Mergers & Acquisitions - 4:00 - 5:00 pm
• Employment - 4:00 - 5:00 pm

More info on this great event for people thinking of starting up a studio, or who have started up can be found here.

Stuff from 3D Stimulus

So this is really a highlight of some of the info as there are videos of some of the talks to come later.

Okay, so most probably couldn't care, but asking to help folks at the local New England resellers out, they're looking to get 200 people signed up for the 20th April event. GET.

If they do, they'll get some money to put towards local events, and they've helped put on a lot of cool events for artists in the Boston area, so if you're in the area or just want to help out, register through them and it'll be much appreciated.

The webinar is mostly a bunch of presentations about vfx, one is from the effects on Black Swan and another movie and one is a game I think.

If anyone is interested, give Heidi a shout - hjelev@greateasterntech.com

She needs your name, email and either an address or your company name and she'll automatically opt you out of receiving any Autodesk newsletter spam, unless you actually want it.

Other bits and pieces, Motion Builder or the Entertainment Suite of products, if you buy through GET, you'll get a free Kinect and set up with hacked software to have your own motion capture device out of it.

www.brekel.com if you want to check out the software that was demo'ed as a mocap software that plugged right into Motion Builder.

A nice free shader for people to use in their work was 3Point Shader Lite found here.

3D Stimulus Day

GET are hosting another 3D Stimulus Day event - 9th April

A recap about the event, which is an awesome free art and networking event -

Location: Mt. Ida, Newton, MA

Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm

Presentations this year include:

• Chad Moore of Turbine and Rigging Dojo, with Job Hunting Tips for 3D Artists
• Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz of Owlchemy Labs, presenting Mixing 2D and 3D in Unity
• A panel-discussion with various tech artists from local game companies, mediated by Chad Moore
  • Ryan Griffin, Senior Character TD, Turbine
  • Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts
  • Brandon Bateman, Senior Tech Artist, Turbine
  • Farley Chery, Instructor, ITT Institute and Bunker Hill Community College
  • Justin Woodard, Technical Artist, Turbine
• Willem Van Der Schyf, Tencent Boston, presenting his Workflow for Character Creation using Max & ZBrush
• Afternoon networking session upstairs with demos from local individuals and companies including Brass Monkey, Vermont Digital Arts, Owlchemy Labs, 3d Camera Technology, Mocap with Kinect and Motion Builder and lots more!!!

Adding to this, The Boston Post Mortem are having a meet up on the 13th April and will be talking about Game Law Hot Topics.

This should be a great, interesting meet up too.

PAX East - Party

10th March 7-10pm at the MS NERD Centre - http://paxeast031011.eventbrite.com/

For anyone in the area and especially those going to PAX East, it's a great party event to network with people.

It's a freebie event, get in touch for the discount code, it's there to keep those not in the industry off with the entry cost.

Pass it on to your friends.

http://blog.masstlc.org/2010/03/masstlc-pax-party-maxes-out-microsoft.html That's a link to some info of the party last year!

Boston Post Mortem - HTML5 and Akihabara

So the last Boston Post Mortem meet up event took place at the UK Trade and Investment office as part of the consulate.

The speakers for the event were Darren Torpey and Darius Kazemi, who discussed HTML5 game development, focusing on the open-source Akihabara framework but also covering other available HTML5 game engines and general advances in HTML5/Javascript.

Akihabara is a 2D (bitmap graphics) game engine based on the canvas tag, part of HTML5, a great platform for quick product prototyping, with very little knowledge of coding or web work to get simple stuff together and working.

Some information about the engine with tutorials can be found here.

Fantastic documentation about the engine can be found here.

The Boston Game James website has a copy of the presentation which includes a great list of links to the various demos and other engines, which you can find here.

Boston August Event Line up

Starting out with the Boston Post Mortem - 10th Aug, 7-10pm at the usual venue, the Skellig in Waltham.

The speaker this month, Terrence Masson, who will be giving a SIGGRAPH roundup.

Boston Game Jam - 21-22 Aug at the MIT site in Cambridge MA.

The theme for this event is about "Immigration" It should be a fun and light hearted event and a chance to mingle with other devs in the area.

Boston Game Loop - 28th Aug 9am start with conferences kicking off at 11am till the end of the day, held at the MS NERD building in Cambridge, MA $40 donation.

Scott of MacGuffin Games has more info here.

Boston Unity Group - BUG - 31st Aug 7-pm at the MS NERD Centre, Cambridge MA.

This is a great event and networking opportunity for game devs and for anyone who uses or is interesting in using and learning more about Unity. The prior event, which was the first, had people from many different backgrounds using the game engine for none game uses, so was very interesting to see people show off their projects.

Boston Post Mortem - Indies Will Shoot You in the Knees

The last Boston Post Mortem meet up was recorded by, Darren Torpey.

Information about the talk can be found here. The discussion panel was talking about indie game development, a repeat subject from the PAX East discussion, but an awesome talk by 3 Boston indie studios on the subject.

The youtube video is in six parts -













Link to the Youtube page with info is here.

Boston Unity Group - First Meet up

Boston Unity Group - BUG

This is a new meet up group organised for the Boston indie dev scene, though anyone who is interested in, or has used Unity were more than welcome to the event.

The group met up in Northeastern University for the first time, a good venue, organised my Elliott Mitchell and Alex Schwartz.

Kicking off the event, Tom Higgins, community manager at Unity Technologies, spoke about Unity, the company, the product and what will come in the future as well as understanding how to get the best out of it with various pricings and features. The afternoon session held an all-day workshop dubbed ‘Unity Day’. This was a series of tutorials on Unity.

Below is, in three parts, a video of the talk given by Tom Higgins.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:





The next of these bi-monthly Boston Unity Group (game developer meetup) meets will be August 31 @ the Mircosoft N.E.R.D. center in Cambridge, MA. 7 p.m.

Sony Playstation - Move

This is just a little summary of information gained at the last Boston Post Mortem, held 20th May.

So what makes this a good thing to develop on? Hard question to answer with out seeing any killer apps for it, though the tech demo was pretty interesting and does show some potential for tools creation and as a editor for current games.

What Sony are doing to help developers is providing the Live Motion 2, the motion library for free to all licensed Sony devs and they are trying to make a push for people to use this by offering various bundle deals, most including the Eye Toy camera which is need to get this working, which is a good thing as they have only something like 10M Eye Toys out there at the moment.

What doesn't help, certainly devs going for the casual sports and pub type games, there won't be any controller add ons, such that you get with the Wii controller with all those baseball bats, golf clubs etc. This I think is a bit of a short fall as it breaks the illusion of being part of the event, sure this thing is accurate but there is a much larger level of disconnect from the game because of that.

A concern for who will use this is another big issue. For a party accessory, unlike the Wii, this becomes very expensive, having the PS3, the camera, the Move and the navigator, not a cheap toy to bring to a party. Also you need a certain level of light for this to work, and it needs to be consistent light for it to work at its best, so that could rule out anywhere with strobed party lights. A nice tough though, the controller can phase out colours which are similar to the background and lighting so that they won't create problems with the controller and if two or more controllers are using similar colours, it can auto change the colours for you to make game play smoother and easier.

You can have up to four Move controllers on any one system which is good, but there was no mention if that included the navigator controller or not and they would take up a joypad spot, so limiting how much of a mix and match you can have.

Allowing older games to function with these, should be easy apparently, though this is a little more in the programmer sphere than I understand, it did sound relatively simple because the units used very little system resources with a 13m/s latency per SPU for each controller. I think I got that right.

What was very nice, the face detection, this could add quite a bit of fun to game design because it could track relative age, eye movement, head movement, if you had glasses and whether you were smiling or not. It could also consider your height, if you were sitting or standing. This was a nice mechanic for game show puzzle type games because it could indicate various facial factors.

Gestures, which was also quite nice, but very glitchy. It allowed you to create a rough skeleton of your height and build, so you could control yourself and using the buttons on the controller to add fine hand control, something they pointed out that Natal didn't have. It was nice to see, but it didn't work that great though.

Big issue was the line of sight, the light on the Move controller had to see the camera and getting in the way either because you were moving around, someone passing through, or you swinging the controller back behind for something like a baseball swing broke the controller, left you hanging in the air as it were. It was quite quick to pick you back up, but it still broke the illusion.

Next Boston Post Mortem

The next IGDA local Boston meet up is going to be the 20th August.

It's going to be at the usual venue, the Skellig, in Waltham.

Sony Move team are sponsoring the event, not much in way of details out yet, but they will be doing a talk and demo on the device.

Boston Post Mortem - Animation Panel

The BPM meet up was last night and the topic was about Animation, information about the event is here.

The panellists consisted of Ron Friedman (panelist, Tencent Boston), John Lindemuth (panelist, Turbine Inc.), Andy Welihozkiy (panelist, Rockstar New England).

I'm only going to summarise what they covered, which included what they looked for in a animation reel, how best to present your work and what to look out for in doing good work.

The reel, they all agreed that the time should be around 1 min to 1:30 in length, starting out with your best piece but also ending with something strong and memorable, but you should also include your name and contact details at the start and end of the reel for convenience.

One tip they suggested for people who don't have a lot of samples in their reel is to break down the animation into segments, show off a particular part of a animation, break to another area and show that and then showing the whole sequence as a whole.

Using sound got a split response, couple of them would watch without sound just to get a sense of weight and style of animation, while one panellist liked seeing how you timed and edited your animation to the music/dialogue to see if you understood how your animation might be used. They all agreed to stay away from "funky" music though and if you don't have a reel that is well timed to the music to not have any.

Weight is a big part of animation, so they liked to see a whole character, don't zoom that character in on a particular motion, such as a hand shake, they want to see how the character stands and leans around as a whole, not just the particular motion of the hand shake, even if you add some silly jitters and coughs or what have you to bring the sequence to life.

More about weight, they often could tell if someone acted out their animation or used reference video because it added a more natural rhythm to the animation which is what they want to see, you using the best resources out there to make the best animation, so don't be afraid to look in a mirror and be goofy acting out the sequences, don't be afraid to use your webcam to record your motions. All good studios should have some sort of set up or space to do this.

Don't be afraid to include the bouncing ball in your reel if you can show good weight and life to the ball bouncing, they want to see you understand how things move, not necessarily have the most sexy looking models, but it is how you used them that impress and they appreciate seeing the basics. They want to see these basics because it shows you understand how a walk cycle works, how a ball moves around. If you understand that and also show a good little sequence you'll be in a good position because a cool sequence doesn't show that you understand all the fundamentals, just that you had a lot of time to tweak a certain animation, plus it gives you more content to show.

PAX East

Well a nice read up can be found here.

Nice that it'll be finding a larger home for the next couple of years. The Hynes Convention was cool, but way to small, massive over crowding, huge queues and virtually impossible to get into any of the talks unless you wanted to spend hours queuing.

Highlights of the event, seeing the indies, a lot of local ones, but also from all over the country. MIT with their Gambit Lab helped having a large stand that local indies could be a part of which was great.

Also loved the classic arcade section, reliving childhood games, even playing the original Pong, that was awesome.

Plenty of new games being displayed, even Atomic Games, with their change in design from the dropped controversial game were there trying to drum up interest for their now download game.

Lots of surveys to be had, lots of prize raffles of gear to be had, plenty of swag, but most of it was pretty boring, nice t-shirts, but would have been fun to see some more original stuff.

Boston Post Mortem Round up and the IGDA

This months meet up of the Boston Post Mortem was a round up of what has happened to the chapter during the year as well as highlighting plans for the future.

These plans included organising elections to the board of the chapter now that it is an official chapter of the IGDA as well as highlighting a few of the planned chapter meet up events, which have been provisionally arranged for the next few months, which for the most part do actually sound pretty interesting.

Also at the event was Joshua Caulfied, the executive director for the IGDA.

He talked a little bit of what he is hoping to accomplish and what has been happening at the organisation, but much of the evening was just a question and answer session, which he seemed to hold his own at and certainly a very pleasant, well meaning person who made himself very open to communication, staying for over an hour after the event to answer more questions from people.

One accomplishment he touched on was the medical health insurance pool being offered to those in the US, but he didn't go into how they would filter those who just joined the org for this benefit without being a developer. He did say that if people found better rates or plans on their own that he would be able to go to the brokers to find out why those better rates weren't on offer to people though. These rates might not necessarily be cheap, but the group rate should offer better rates for many people, especially those with families or pre-existing conditions.

Liability insurance as a group rate was also being offered to members which a lot of smaller start ups were interested about but he wasn't able to give any details at the moment, certainly regarding those outside of the US.

My main question to him was what he was doing to get the "I" in the organisation to have any real meaning and value to the members outside of the US via promoting communication, attractiveness to join or stay as a member as well as what advantages were being offered to those aboard.

His answer consisted of organising events aimed at those aboard, starting with web seminars with topics to help indie devs, going over local cultural differences, how to market to various other markets, how to go about localisation and distribution. These web events to begin with are being aimed at those countries who have shown most interest, such as Japan, China, Spain and Mexico.

To make the most of these events, they were being planned on being time shifted so that they could be viewed at a decent hour for those in the countries these events were being aimed at so that they could be involved in the discussions. These events should then be made available as streaming media for the rest of the membership afterwards but in a none interactive format.

Another way to help bolster the organisation through the ground up was giving more value to local chapters, such things that happen in the BPM, speakers doing practice runs for larger conferences. He was hoping to get in touch with people who do these speeches and arrange for them to do talks in their local chapter areas, perhaps offering to help out subsidising any out of pocket expenses if they had to travel beyond a local destination.

Bringing chapters together was another aim, but getting chapter organisers to provide event feedback after events and highlights of information and talks held so that they could be provided to the organisation as a whole so that every one gets to benefit from these hubs and if nothing else to act as a starting point for discussion for those smaller chapters.

A big issue of contention was the whole board of directors election process. The plan is now to lead a more structured approach of having each candidate answer 10 standard questions as part of their manifesto and information blurb. There is plans to also arrange a video conference some how where each candidate gets 10 minutes to talk about themselves and go over anything they feel appropriate as well as to answer question fielded towards them. How this is all done hasn't been sorted out yet, but is high on the agenda to be finalised soon.

The whole web problems. Part of the problems with slow responses to communicate with members were down to custom features implemented by the previous ED, Jason, who never documented how functions worked so that the board would have to get him to fix issues or to explain how to get things working such as the whole group email system is still tied into his little system.

The four years of development of the website, using two developers, he did mention who they were but I don't feel I should mention who they are so if your interested, email him. The reason for this, at the start they had cost estimates of $150K for a AMS system and creating their own being considerably less than this, though he didn't give an exact figure of how much they saved.

What they wanted from the system, not just a BBS, but the whole backend to the database, keeping membership information sorted by types, automating sending out membership dues and discount coupon codes to various events as well as opening up the studio membership so that those in the studios knew they were members.

The frontend at the moment is being handled by 20 volunteers, only 4 of whom have any decent experience with Drupal, this is part of the problem with slow responses and glitches with the site. They are looking for a proper web developer to help fix these issues and are interviewing a few companies to help out. One particular place is offering the hosting of the site on much better servers as well as 80 hours of development time to work through and fix the whole site. What Josh wants is a timeline to work with so that he can inform the membership what is happening, which at the moment is 3 months to get everything fixed and working properly or they'll revert back to vB.

He also said that they were limiting emails to the members to a maximum of 2 per week and he was trying to prioritise what kind of information is being sent out. Something that would help him would be members directly contacting him with any particular issues so that he is personally aware of them so that they could be addressed, for instance he wasn't aware what people were thinking about with the whole ghosting of posts and the time delay of them appearing or not appearing if you weren't logged in. This was a system glitch and not an attempt to censor posters which is something he is very against doing, as long as members follow the rules of the forum, more from a legal side as well as not being abusive to others. So he should hopefully address this and other concerns in further communications.

If anyone wants to get in contact with Joshua, his email is - joshua @ igda.org

Boston Game Loop

For anyone on the East coast, especially around Boston, check out the Boston Game Loop

GameLoop is organized by Darius Kazemi (Orbus Gameworks) and Scott Macmillan (Macguffin Games) who are great characters who do a lot for the local scene and are instrumental in the success of the local IGDA chapter, the Boston Post Mortem.

The event this year is the second to be organised and has a much wider reach of people attending from all over the country, but obviously with a more local slant of attendees.

It's a "unconference" which basically means people talk about what they know to those who are most interested. How it works, people turn up and introduce themselves and what they are interested in at the beginning. With that information, people can suggest topics to talk about that they have knowledge in and that other people are interested in and can contribute towards.

This means that there might be micro niche topics with only 5-8 people being involved, but they will all gain and give so that they all benefit.

The whole point is to have a more intimate setting, people aren't putting on massive GDC style talks which only hold interest in parts for some people.

There's also a $20 suggested donation for this event to help the organisers cover the cost of the event which other wise would be out of their own pockets, cover costs of coffee and snacks etc.

Location, the "NERD" centre on the first floor of the Microsoft Office, Kendal Square, MA

Go, enjoy, learn and network!

Edit: to add, this event is on the 15th August, and for industry people only, so no students.

Steve Meretzky

Steve Meretzky is a great character and designer in the Boston dev scene who has produced some great games in the past, especially The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

He gave a really interesting talk about fun in games called "Bring Back the Fun" at the Boston Post Mortem. This wasn't about how to make games fun, but about how to help make making games more enjoyable looking at past trends and how other industries have done things to change a slump.

The whole talk was filmed, but it wasn't very long so it would certainly be worth taking the time to watch it when it comes online, probably later in the week, a link will probably show on the BPM site and on Steve's.

It was a very inspiring talk too and certainly one of the most amusing events held for quite a while.

It's just a shame that the area will be losing Steve as he is moving on to the west coast for a new adventure.

January Boston Post Mortem

This months talk was given by Randy Smith who was the designer that helped shape the Thief series of games for Looking Glass and recently of EALA.

This was a talk he gave at the Montreal International Game Summit, called "Games Are Art, and What To Do About It."

It was interesting and to summarise the talk, he went into how game mechanics have progressed over the years talking of the parallel of how peoples comprehension of movies have grown, so you don't necessarily have to be blatantly obvious with every detail to show emotion or the progression of time, people know a day shot followed by a night shot in a movie means that time has progressed, even though they didn't when film first came about. This kind of evolution is happening and how it needs to continue so that the game users experience can be more engaging. The slap in the face uninteractive cut scenes, overly forced sound and facial animations to show emotion fail because they aren't engaging, they break the flow of the experience that takes the game player out of the continuity of the expeirence much like if a movie director had a statue roll up in the middle of the cinema at a particular moment to show an emotion would be breaking of the flow and feeling of the movie.

He also talked about design decisions and different genres of games, how best to engage emotion out of the game player so that they have a feeling of accomplishment, how they can care about an outcome so that they have the desire to replay the game in to see a different outcome. It all comes about asking the question "Why?" at every stage of the design process. What you think will be a good idea, question why. What way of having a game mechanic do such and such, question why. Continually questioning these decisions brings about a more layered mechanic to the game so that you can see and show how engaging and what responses you are looking for. It also can lead to interesting spin off thoughts that could lead to new avenues to explore.

Boston Post Mortem

The IGDA's local chapter, the Boston Post Mortem September monthly meeting was sponsored this month by GamerDNA so a big hand of thanks to them for the talk, the food and the free drinks.

Jon Radoff who heads the organisation gave the talk, which was about gaming trends covering the big hits of COD4, GTA4 etc and the world of MMO's.

It was interesting to see how Rock Band faired against Guitar Hero in the long term in the amount of usage spent by players.

There was a lack of coverage on the indie market which I felt was a shame because it would have been interesting to hear how indie developers fair against similar competition - How Castle Crashers compares with other indie released games in regards to sales and level of actual game time players put in, because it is another realm to the large marketed big budget games, and for many studios, this kind of data would be far more valuable.

The venue, the Skellig is a charming venue though with a good bar and space at the back for the event to take place, but these events are busy and seating is limited, this means it can be difficult to actually ask questions in the Q&A session after the talk. Jon was willing to answer questions privately, I just didn't think that benefitted the audience as much as it could.

The crowd was made up with a good mix of professionals in the industry, the location being fairly central and with a lot of free parking just behind the pub helping out a lot in this regard. There were a large number of students or recent grads from a local games art school there, they were interesting to talk with, but did make networking and job hunting more diluted for those already in the industry.